


Vaccines

by arctowardsthesun



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, mentions of child death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-18
Updated: 2013-09-18
Packaged: 2017-12-26 22:53:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/971245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arctowardsthesun/pseuds/arctowardsthesun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve finds out about some major medical discoveries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vaccines

Photos were good, right? That’s why Steve had dragged out his high school yearbooks. Portraits of classmates, teachers, teams, all long gone now.

A hand appeared between him and the page of senior portraits. “Hellooooo.” Clint had apparently decided that Steve had been reminiscing about his class for far too long. “Who’s that?” He pointed at Susan George.

“Oh, just a classmate.”

“What’s with the sweater?”

“They didn’t wear sweaters in September when you were in high school?”

“You know what I mean.”

Susan George, she’d sat next to him in how many classes? All of them? Since first grade? They’d had a connection, ever since she had had polio the summer between third and fourth grade and had come back to school with one arm atrophied beyond use. And she had worn her cardigans around her shoulders, like a cape, ever since.

Nobody mocked her openly, of course, that wasn’t done. But Steve had always understood what it was like to not quite fit in and when she had gone from nobody in particular to an outcast, they started, well, not quite talking but exchanging meaningful glances.

“She had polio, as a kid.”

“Polio? Didn’t they get rid of that in the Dark Ages?” Steve looked taken aback at this comment. “Oh right, you’re from the Dark Ages.”

“They got rid of it at all!?”

“A guy developed a vaccine for it, in the 50s? Maybe? I don’t know, at some point. It’s not gone from everywhere, I had to get the shot myself, working for S.H.I.E.L.D.” Clint rolled up his sleeve and pointed to a small pock-mark on his upper arm. “I don’t know much more about it, not my area of expertise, you’d have to ask Banner or Stark for the details.”

_Or the internet_ , Steve thought, _Stark showed me that internet_ Encyclopedia Britannica _thing_.

“You doing okay?” Steve shook his head, as if to clear it.

“I’m just a little stunned, that’s all. It’s not as if I didn’t get my smallpox vaccine when I joined the Army-”

“Smallpox was a thing?” Clint interrupted. “I got a vaccine too, like a good little soldier but I guess it wasn’t eradicated until well after you were... Well.”

Steve pulled his phone out of his pocket. When he had discovered that that digital _Encyclopedia Britannica_ thing had an app for the phone, he’d pestered Stark until he’d made the phone compatible with it. If technology he’d never dreamed of fit in his pocket, he’d darned well use it to not look like so much of a fool all the time. He painstakingly typed “Polio Vaccine” into the search bar and skimmed the entry.

There were vaccines for diphtheria and pertussis now too? Steve remembered the baby next door that had died from pertussis, he had been able to hear the horrible coughing the whole family had had through the thin walls of the apartment. He’d had pertussis too, as a kid, he’d imagined that the coughing fits were like what gassed soldiers had felt like. The asthma hadn’t helped.

Clint peeked over his shoulder and saw what he was reading. “You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but there are people who think that vaccines cause more problems than they solve.”

“Really?” Steve was glaring.

“Um, well, yes. I’m not one of those people,” he rushed to clarify. “It’s just a Thing.”

Steve kept glaring. “But babies _die_ of those things.”

“I know.”

Steve went back to his phone and searched again. “Measles? You’ve dealt with measles? And mumps? And there are people who think that vaccination is a bad thing because of some doctor in England whose research has been disproven?” He sighed. Maybe he had been born in the Dark Ages.

He started to pace, thinking of all the lives squandered to these diseases. Susan? She’d wanted to be a doctor (Mrs Bradley, their third grade teacher had done her best to squash that idea when it came up on career day, “Ladies are nurses, gentlemen are doctors.”) but she’d been undaunted. And then came the polio.

“Hellooooo,” Clint interrupted his thoughts again.

“What,” he snapped.

“I, I think you need a new hobby.” _That_ was not what Steve had been expecting. “A campaign or something, promoting vaccination. Talk to Stark, I’m sure he’d back you. Besides, you did stuff like this before, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but-”

“But nothing, you did what you did to save lives, do what you do even, why should this be any different?”

Steve started to smile, it would be a nice change, building things, instead of watching them get torn down. “I’ll think about it.”

*****  
“Agent Barton tells me that you’re interested in starring in an ad campaign.”

Steve lost his focus for a moment at the unexpected interruption to his work out and the punching bag went flying.

“Director Fury, sir, is there any particular reason you like interrupting my work outs?”

“You don’t need to work out, Rogers.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Beside the point. Barton filled me in on the little conversation you two had last week. I think it would be good, get you out into the world.”

“You tried that once, sir, and look how that turned out.”

“I don’t think this is going to lead to much besides a few lives saved. Stark talked to the WHO and the CDC and they are very interested.”

Darn it, his phone was in his gym bag, so this was going to be a Galaga moment. Always and forever the Galaga moments. “The who, sir?”

Fury looked at him a moment. “I’m just going to assume you’re not making a bad pun involving the 60s rock band. The WHO, World Health Organization, they’re one of the ones trying to eradicate diseases through vaccination. Part of the UN.”

“Ah.” Steve had always appreciated how Fury never talked down to him, just because he was a man out of time. He was no Stark or Banner, learning whatchamo physics overnight or figuring out how to track the tesseract in less than a minute but that didn’t mean he was incompetent.

**Author's Note:**

> No apologies for the soapbox. I have a bachelor's degree in microbiology, vaccines are one of the most incredible tools we've got in disease prevention.


End file.
